Today in Supreme Court History: June 12, 1967

6/12/1967: Loving v. Virginia decided.

 

Comments

[DaivdBehar]

Equal and person are second grade vocabulary words. The racist lawyer profession had trouble understanding them for 100 years of genocidal maniac jihad against blacks and against women.

[Queen Amalthea]

Of course even a bird-brain should know Virginia argued under the equal application theory that they were certainly in compliance with the plain English definition of 'equal' and 'person.'

[Dr. Ed 2]

And the Queen clearly does not know how to read.

[Queen Amalthea]

I know how to read enough to know that the literal meaning of the terms involved does not obviously determine this outcome. Virginia argued that the law was 'equal' to all 'persons' because all persons of any race were equally forbidden to marry any person of another race.

[DaivdBehar]

The idea that whites will be a minority soon is from a math error at the Census. What is it with math and the lawyer?

When minorities succeed, they want to marry a white woman, to bear and raise their children.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/the-myth-of-a-majority-minority-america/ar-AAKZLqF?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531

[Cal Cetín]

Yet a few years after that decision, the Supreme Court decided that there was no constitutional right to gay marriage - indeed that the claim to such a right raised no substantial federal question.

It took almost half a century for the Court to recognize that the plain and obvious implication of a right to interracial marriage was a right to same-sex marriage. I mean, it's obvious, isn't it? So why did it take them fifty years? Bunch of bigots.

[I Callahan]

Artie, is that you?

[Michael P]

That's not at all analogous.

If you want a logically consistent argument, point out that government should treat same-sex marriage the same way as marriage between other people who (know they) cannot conceive their own children. If a post-menopausal woman can marry a man, let two men or two women get married. That's equal treatment under the law.

[Sebastian Cremmington]

3 of the first 6 presidents had bad cases on “ding dong don’t work” syndrome and they knew it before that got married.

[Michael Ejercito]

The Baker plaintiffs made that argument.

[Queen Amalthea]

"It took almost half a century for the Court to recognize that the plain and obvious implication of a right to interracial marriage was a right to same-sex marriage."

It took them about an entire century to recognize that the right to interracial marriage was a protected right under the EPC.

[Dilan Esper]

I realize it was technically a precedent, but Baker was really nothing more than a cert denial.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Cal, there was no need of gay marriage back then because same sex couples weren't (couldn't be) prosecuted for cohabitation.

Opposite sex couples were.

Remember how "Three's Company" was controversial -- in California -- in the 1970's and how Mr. Roper had to be told that the male roommate was gay?

[JasonT20]

Cal, there was no need of gay marriage back then because same sex couples weren’t (couldn’t be) prosecuted for cohabitation.

Until Lawrence v. Texas (2003), gay men could be prosecuted for sodomy, though.

[Queen Amalthea]

"there was no need of gay marriage back then because same sex couples weren’t (couldn’t be) prosecuted for cohabitation."

There's a lot more to marriage than being roommates with benefits.

[Dr. Ed 2]

READ the VA law I quoted below -- or the SCOTUS decision, which is where I got it from.

In theory, the Lovings could have enjoyed all of the other benefits as VA only prohibited cohabitation when one was married out of state.

[Queen Amalthea]

Well, apart the really minor aspect of not being able to live together having sex, their marriage would not be *recognized* legally (and therefore not socially), which is a big deal in many ways for most people.

It's funny how the defenders of traditional marriage often really think so very little of it (as long as thinking so can thought to be used to deny it to same sex folks).

[Queen Amalthea]

"VA only prohibited cohabitation when one was married out of state."

That's wrong. From the opinion: "The two statutes under which appellants were convicted and sentenced are part of a *comprehensive statutory scheme aimed at prohibiting and punishing interracial marriages*. "

Section 259, which defines the penalty for miscegenation, provides:

"Punishment for marriage. -- If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years."

Also:
"Other central provisions in the Virginia statutory scheme are § 20-57, which automatically voids all marriages between "a white person and a colored person" without any judicial proceeding,"

It was prohibited for couples like the Lovings to marry in Virginia, and if a couple tried to avoid this by going to another state and marrying, if they came back and tried to live as husband and wife they were guilty of the accompanying statute, and in both cases the marriage would be voided without any judicial proceeding.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Someone can't read...

[Queen Amalthea]

It's not me that made the error you did based upon a partial read and misunderstanding of that partial read.

[David Nieporent]

That’s wrong.

Of course it's wrong; it's Dr. Ed. A police officer told him that this is what the decision really was, so he doesn't need to ask any lawyers.

[Joseph Camden]

Fun fact: Virginia has mandatory one day course for newly admitted lawyers which it renamed in honor of Harry Carrico (author of Loving v. Commonwealth) in 2007.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Penumbras! Emanations! Allowed Clarence Thomas to marry a white woman!

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Justice Thomas doesn't seem very grateful.

Mostly, he seems disaffected and cranky . . . as if he knows he is a loser on the wrong side of history.

[CJColucci]

Of course, if his views on constitutional theory prevailed, his marriage would be a crime.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Only in 16 states....

What people aren't told about this case is that (a) the Lovings got married in DC and then (b) moved from VA to DC when (c) convicted of being an opposite sex couple living together without a marriage license that VA recognized.

Apparently cohabitation was prosecuted 60 years ago....

[Dan Schiavetta]

The Lovings were offered a deal: 1) no prison if 2) they stayed out of Virginia for 25 years (coincidentally after Mildred Jeter passed childbearing age).

[JasonT20]

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix. - Virginia Judge Leon Bazile, in 1965, upholding his original ruling from 1958 that the Lovings would have to leave Virginia for 25 years in order to have their 1 year sentence suspended for violating Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924.

They were not charged with co-habitation, but with violating a ban on whites and non-whites marrying. The law specifically forbid such couples marrying in other jurisdictions and then returning to Virginia.

[JasonT20]

To add further, their guilty plea may have been admitting to "cohabitation" in a marriage that Virginia did not recognize, but that is not what got them arrested and charged.

The Lovings were charged under Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code, which prohibited interracial couples from being married out of state and then returning to Virginia, and Section 20–59, which classified miscegenation as a felony, punishable by a prison sentence of between one and five years.

As captcrisis pointed out, it appears that their guilty plea to cohabitation was a deal.

[Dr. Ed 2]

The statute they violated (20-50) read:

"Leaving State to evade law. If any white person and colored person shall go out of this State, for the purpose of being married, and with the intention of returning, and be married out of it, and afterwards return to and reside in it, cohabiting as man and wife, they shall be punished as provided in 20-59, and the marriage shall be governed by the same law as if it had been solemnized in this State. The fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage."[emphasis added]

They were free to return to Virginia after getting married in DC -- only not to cohabitate there.

[Dr. Ed 2]

NB: As cohabitation itself was proof of marriage, they'd been guilty even if not married. Remember too that this was pre-computers -- how would VA even know if they were or not?

[DaivdBehar]

What happened to the Full Faith and Credit Clause here?

[JasonT20]

So what exactly is your point here? They were charged with "cohabitation" because that was proof that they had married in violation of the Racial Integrity Act that banned them from getting married. (By the way, multiple sources on the case I just red have pointed out that their home was raided at 2 am, with the authorities apparently hoping to catch them actually having sex, which would have also violated laws against whites and non-whites having sex.) Had they both been white or both non-white, they couldn't have been charged under that statute. Your whole thing with "cohabitation" is a non sequitur.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Someone has never heard of the middle-of-the-night welfare inspections that were common back then -- they'd show up at, say, 2AM looking for the husband.

A description of the practice is mentioned in Volume 72 of the Yale Law Journal, which, according to Yale, was published in 192 & 1963. See: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9026&context=ylj

[Queen Amalthea]

Bizarre. The Loving case was not about welfare.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Just in case you might actually *be* that stupid, let me mention that if middle-of-the-night inquests were both acceptable and being practiced, it's not all that unreasonable that the people doing that might serve the grand jury warrant in a similar manner.

Furthermore, is arresting a construction worker -- who is on the job at 7AM (and hence up much earlier) really any different from the pre-dawn arrest of Roger Stone? See: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/roger-stones-predawn-fbi-arrest-operation-sparks-controversy

If you are going to invade someone's home, the safest time to do it is while they are asleep as you are less likely to get shot....

[Queen Amalthea]

You've no evidence their was any such search going on and then you add a conjecture that if there were the other warrant may have been served. It's a tower of conjecture and handwaving.

[JasonT20]

You are clearly trolling, at this point. Somehow, you think that you can distract with all this bullshit about "cohabitation" or middle of the night "welfare" checks as if the Lovings weren't targeted because racist assholes just didn't want white people and Black people mixing. The judge that sentenced them in 1958 explicitly listed the racist basis of the law. End of fucking story.

[Ogmios]

Communists were sure they were on the right side of history. Their ultimate triumph was inevitable, they said. How'd that work out for them?

In other words, don't be so sure of yourself, little man.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Another bet on conservative bigotry, superstition, and backwardness?

[DaivdBehar]

Artie is a Commie. It is a thing with them. Lucky he does not have access to guns, as other Commies do.

[Dr. Ed 2]

And a half century later, 77% of Black births are to an unmarried mother.

Ironic, no?

[JasonT20]

Ironic, no?

I don't see how that is ironic. For it to be ironic, you would have to have expected some kind of negative correlation between the freedom of interracial couples to marry legally with the rate of single parenthood among Black women. Since I don't see any reason to expect any such correlation, you are simply bringing up something irrelevant.

[Dr. Ed 2]

When is the last time that anyone was arrested for cohabitation???

[bernard11]

This too is irrelevant.

If I had to guess, I would say that Dr. Ed is trying to minimize the significance of the VA law, and of the decision, but who knows what goes on in his mind.

[Jimmy the Dane]

Truth is these laws were rarely enforced at least in post WWII America. I remember seeing a study that searched criminal dockets from Southern jurisdictions to find how often miscegenation laws were enforced. Although due to the integrity of the historical records, searching was difficult, it yielded very few prosecutions. And, this is further supported by the actual history behind Loving. Although not completely contrived standing, they were "recruited" to bring the challenge. (The same was true of many of the civil rights cases including Brown itself). Part of the reason for doing that was because there were so few examples of actual prosecutions, finding a test case to work through the courts was difficult.

[Queen Amalthea]

Laws need not be enforced a lot of times to constrain people who would otherwise like to be engaged in the prohibited behavior.

[Krychek_2]

As with sodomy statutes, they were rarely enforced, but they were a ticking time bomb that could go off at any time if you happened to be unlucky enough to have your domestic situation come to the state's attention. But prosecution was never the point; the point was to give people the legal status of criminals so they could be discriminated against in other ways.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Now we use the mental health laws for the same purpose...

[David Nieporent]

Is that what happened to you?

[Krychek_2]

Boston, of all places, had a case in the 1970s. At the arraignment, the judge asked who the complaining witness was, and was told it was the girl's mother. The judge said, "Maybe the girl's mother should mind her own business. Case dismissed."

[Dr. Ed 2]

Are you sure it wasn't fornication -- i.e. *not* being married?

I saw a case on that in the 1980s and the SJC said that just because a law isn't frequently enforced doesn't mean that it can't be. In this instance, the couple was doing it in a van in front of random children who were watching -- which likely is why the officer arrested them.

[Dr. Ed 2]

According to the ACLU, the MA statute was repealed in 1843.
See: https://uscivilliberties.org/historical-overview/4158-miscegenation-laws.html

Now there was a different statute, repealed in 2008, that would prohibit marriages that were illegal in the marriagee's home state.

[Jimmy the Dane]

Jimmy gets into his time machine to go back to this date and time. With paper in hand, walks into a bar.

From the Future (FTF): "Wow look what the Supreme Court just ruled today!"

Reasonable Man from Past (RMP): "Yeah those southern states are crazy....glad the Supreme Court finally put an end to it."

FTF: "I wonder if in the future the Court will ever use this decision to find that two men or two women or maybe even a bunch of different people have the right to marry..."

RMP: "Don't be crazy!"

[Dr. Ed 2]

Forget that -- Lawrence v. Texas was in 2003 -- and you'd get the same answer even then. (Remember that the MA decision wasn't until 2004.)

And I remember being in DC a decade ago and telling people about Massachusetts K-12 policies on transgenderism and people not believing me until I pulled up copies of these policies from the DESE website.

There's a LOT people wouldn't have believed in 1967, starting with a 77% Black illegitimacy rate.

[Jimmy the Dane]

I still have copies of speech code policies from my graduate school (public) before F.I.R.E started to expose those and put them online. People would never believe that these things existed let alone were fully enforced for a point of time. The 90's and 00's were the training days for the extreme cultural marxist left and what we are seeing now is the full blown effect of those incubators from back in the day.

[Dr. Ed 2]

I came across a copy of the infamous 1986 Maine Obscenity referendum question a while back -- it's amazing that the thing almost passed...

[Queen Amalthea]

It's interesting, isn't it, how a post on the anniversary of Loving has uber-Trumper Ed fixated on the 'Black illegitimacy rate.'

[Jimmy the Dane]

Maybe Dr. Ed is concerned about it because no one else seems to be that concerned an entire "underprivileged" community is being born into a family circumstance that handicaps them from the very beginning. You would think if the "anti-racists" out there really cared they might you know be doing something about this....

[Queen Amalthea]

Maybe the "anti-racists" don't want to 'help' minority kids by forcing their parents to stay together.

[Dr. Ed 2]

It isn't -- or shouldn't -- be about what the parents want.

It should be about the welfare of the children.

And the purported "anti racists" put Bull Connor to shame in terms of racism...

[bernard11]

And the purported “anti racists” put Bull Connor to shame in terms of racism…

This is beyond stupid. It stands out even from your other idiocies.
Did you really work in education? Frightening thought.

[Queen Amalthea]

This is the same person that recently said that Chauvin's trial was a greater injustice than that of the Scotsoboro boys. Trumpists seem unable to articulate arguments without absurd levels of hyperbole.

[Dr. Ed 2]

It doesn't matter if Chauvin is *guilty*, he STILL didn't get a fair trial. It's sad that I have to point out the distinction between the two on a legal blog...

Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz is saying the same thing, and they tell me that Harvard Law School is at least a Third Tier law school...

Here's what he said: https://www.foxnews.com/media/alan-dershowitz-without-a-doubt-derek-chauvin-verdict-should-be-vacated

[Queen Amalthea]

"he STILL didn’t get a fair trial"

This, of course, doesn't justify your ridiculous hyperbolic analogy.

[Jimmy the Dane]

Encouraging societal arrangements that are PROVEN to set up children up for success and celebrating those bonds in far from forcing anyone to do anything. There is a difference between preventing the dissolution of marriage by inserting hurdles and encouraging the practice.

The fact that you cannot tell the obvious difference between the two is telling and explains a lot of your comments on this forum...

[Queen Amalthea]

Sure, Jimmy, no one's forcing anyone, the government's just *encouraging* them and *inserting hurdles* to contrary decisions with their personal and family lives.

[Jimmy the Dane]

Still don't get the difference from promoting something like marriage and keeping people in marriage. But then again it doesn't surprise me that you lack the intellectual ability to distinguish between the basic logical difference. That being:

"Hey if you want to have children we as a society find the best environment to raise those children is within the boundaries of being a married company."

vs.

"Hey we understand that you are in a relationship you would like to leave but you see since you are married society has made it extra hard for you to leave the relationship due to the status."

[Queen Amalthea]

Again, sure, the government isn't policing family relations, it's simply 'making it extra hard' for you to leave some relations!

[Queen Amalthea]

"People would never believe that these things existed let alone were fully enforced for a point of time. "

That's ridiculous. You've always had things that would get you disciplined or ostracized or fired in most workplaces in most times. The only thing that has changed is that saying things about traditionally vulnerable folks is now included.

[Jimmy the Dane]

You mean like the left would want us to believe that there really are no witch hunts for supposedly rampant "racists" and "sexists" that have led to firings and social ostracizing for not real cause.

Remember the USB dongle guy who made a joke at a conference that offended a woman so he got fired. Yeah, read an interview where some "feminist" was trying to say that never really happened...

That is some impressive hand waving being used to cover up inconvenient facts.

[Queen Amalthea]

This comment is unresponsive to my point, which was that whatever your graduate speech code was it wasn't historically unique, people have had to watch what they say in many jobs during most historical periods. What's changed is that now you have to watch what you say about traditionally vulnerable folks (both yesterday and today there are going to be cases where someone wrongly is thought to have said the offending thing).

[Dr. Ed 2]

The late Alan Bloom addressed that myth in _the Closing of the American Mind_ -- and he wrote that in the 1980s when personal communications were still private because they were analog.

Now we have the thought police attempting to lynch people for the contents of private emails. But read what Bloom had to say about the myth of McCarthy having any influence over higher education...

[Jimmy the Dane]

Speaking of unresponsive comments, you have just provided us of a prime example of one here....

[Queen Amalthea]

No, I responded to your first point and then your goal post moving second one as well.

[Jimmy the Dane]

You do know what the expression "moving the goalposts" means, right? Because this (and your post below) suggest otherwise....

[Queen Amalthea]

I think it's you that doesn't know since you keep doing it even after it's pointed out. You bring up speech codes in graduate school, and I respond that something like speech codes existed in many workplaces/settings at all times, it's nothing new or unique. You move the goalposts to people being falsely charged with breaking speech norms, and I responded to that too (there were certainly false charges of older and other contemporaneous speech norms).

[Queen Amalthea]

"thought police attempting to lynch people"

This is ridiculous hyperbole, as usual from Ed.

[Jimmy the Dane]

It is actually pretty accurate if you have ever to watch any of the dozens of videos online of antifa violence targeted at people who they disagree with purely because of politics....

[Queen Amalthea]

Another massive goal post shift. Watch your back, lift with your legs if you're going to do that so much.

[Jimmy the Dane]

So someone points out many readily available examples of "thought police" (antifa) "lynch(ing) people" (subjecting people to extreme unjustified violence) and you then decide to throw out a strawman instead of addressing the point. OK.....

[Queen Amalthea]

Lynching has a meaning, there's no antifa activity meeting it. And Ed was clearly not talking about antifa but about 'pc' (if not, then one could equally say any right wing extremist who targeted a left wing target for their politics is a 'thought police' of the right). It's silly hyperbole at best.

[Dr. Ed 2]

You neither know where I've been nor what I've seen.

A lot of people would have thought that the complaints about Derek Chauvin were "ridiculous hyperbole" were there not video of it...

Everyone didn't have a pocket-sized video camera, with audio recording capabilities, back in the nineties and the aughts -- in fact, I stayed with film until about a decade ago because the early digital cameras simply weren't fast enough to record anything more than a blur when things got interesting.

(Even the expensive early digital cameras couldn't write the image fast enough -- they did it line by line, while even a disposable camera recorded the entire image all at once and often got a usable image. We even once used a Polaroid photo for the newspaper -- it wasn't very good, but we were the *only* folks with a photo of the burning frathouse as it was actually burning...)

I'd so love to have a video of the social justice warriors chanting "F*ck the First Amendment" or a lot of other things...

[Queen Amalthea]

"You neither know where I’ve been nor what I’ve seen."

I can safely conclude you've never been somewhere and/or seen someone lynched people for the contents of a private email. It's ridiculous hyperbole, as usual, from you.

[Dr. Ed 2]

https://www.berkshireeagle.com/news/local/statehouse/shrinking-mass-republican-party-struggles-for-direction/article_420bbeb2-ca11-11eb-b212-af5014250264.html

[JasonT20]

Martell was allowed to address the committee at the start of the meeting, which came as a surprise to some in attendance, and said she would not resign over her email to committee members in which she said she was "sickened" that 2nd Congressional District candidate Jeffrey Sossa-Paquette had adopted children with his husband.

Yeah. A person says that she is disgusted by two gay men adopting children, and then some think that makes her unsuited for leadership of a political party committee. I mean, why should the Massachusetts state Republican committee want its members to express at least tolerance of LGBTQ+ rights, if not support of them? It isn't like Massachusetts voters support* the LGBTQ+ community or anything. The woke mob is lynching her!

*(Public Religion Research Institute surveys of Massachusetts adults from 2017 - 80% favor legal same sex marriage, 80% favor LGBTQ nondiscrimination laws, 70% oppose religious exemptions from such laws - these were the #1 or #2 highest rates among all 50 states)

[JasonT20]

And in case it it wasn't clear, the candidate that she was disgusted by is running in a Republican primary, he's not some lefty Democrat. She was disgusted that a member of her own party is in a same sex marriage and had the audacity to adopt children that were without a family. And she said this out loud to her fellows on a party committee that ostensibly wants to win elections in a state with exceptionally strong support for LGBTQ rights. In addition to the bigotry, she is too stupid to be on that committee.

[Queen Amalthea]

Thanks for confirming how spectacularly ignorant you are of what the word lynching means and/or your proclivity for bizarre hyperbole.

[bernard11]

I stayed with film until about a decade ago because the early digital cameras simply weren’t fast enough to record anything more than a blur when things got interesting.

Bullshit. DSLR's are around 20 years old or more.

The Nikon D100, for example, was introduced in 2002, and had a top shutter speed of 1/4000 of a second. It was fully able tor record than "a blur when things got interesting."

You're a moron.

[David Nieporent]

Wait until he tells you that New York City didn't have 911 in the mid-1990s.